


Fucking, Love

by aye_of_newt



Series: Sex, Love, and Emotional Trauma [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, CONSENSUAL and NON graphic sex scene, M/M, Non Graphic, i paused halfway through watching the season to write this because it hurt so much, it is all as NON GRAPHIC as possible, klaus keeps getting hurt and it hurts me, please enjoy my word vomit, references to past sexual violence, references to past violence, season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25643692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aye_of_newt/pseuds/aye_of_newt
Summary: Klaus had been shot, stabbed, electrocuted, zapped by magic violin energy beams, beaten, tortured, and brought back to life.Nothing he’d ever experienced had been as painful as Dave’s fist against his jaw.An examination of Klaus' experience with sex and relationships.
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves
Series: Sex, Love, and Emotional Trauma [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1860523
Comments: 38
Kudos: 365





	Fucking, Love

**Author's Note:**

> heeey
> 
> i'm not even done with season two but I needed to talk about this scene and why it is so fucking heartbreaking because Dave is the only person Klaus has ever loved or trusted and he was betrayed by him because of fucking homophobia and it's devastating 
> 
> it's also super late at night so this may be super bad. sorry. I will regret this won't I...

Klaus lost his virginity at much too young an age. He was not nearly as sober or safe as he should have been, but it hadn’t mattered much to him at the time. Thankfully, the immediate consequences were minor, and with youthful resilience, he brushed the whole thing off as an average coming-of-age milestone. It wouldn’t even cross his mind to worry about it until much later when time and experience put what had happened into an unsettling perspective. 

When the thought did eventually occur to him, nearly fifteen years after it happened, he pushed the cloudy memories of that night down again and resolved to deal with them another day.

Klaus had a few experiences before leaving the Academy, but they were relatively rare and tame⏤ especially by his later standards. It was not until after he struck out on his own that Klaus fully entered that world, having no one there that he needed to escape if he wanted a night out. 

Of course, there was also no one there to make sure he came back. 

Regardless, Klaus always did make it back. Sooner or later.

  
  


For someone on the outside, Klaus’ sex life might have seemed overwhelmingly dangerous, insanely promiscuous, even sad. In Klaus’ opinion, it was perfectly fine, thank you very much. Most of the time, his dates, hookups, _whatever_ the right term was, went absolutely fine. For the most part, they were indisputably positive. Klaus loved freely and without boundaries. Between raves and parties, he found countless kindred spirits who were more than willing to spend a few hours at bay with another passing soul. Really, when it was all put together, most of Klaus’ sexual experiences could be blurred into the motif of lazy late mornings spent in a haze of smoke and long lingering touches, standing still in a harbor away from the rest of the world. 

That was how he preferred to think about it, anyway. Would insist it was so if ever asked. Really, truly believed it was so himself. 

Most of the time.

He didn’t like to think of the nights spent huddled on corners when all of his other options ran out, or how his palms would still feel the grime of the crumpled bills long after he’d washed his hands. 

He very firmly placed fragmented memories of bruises and confusion in the deepest cell of his brain, locked tightly away with ghosts and brothers pooled in their own blood. 

Klaus had been with plenty of people that listened to him. Wanted him to have a good time.

True, he’d been with plenty who hadn’t, but if you sleep with enough people, you’re bound to run into a few clunkers.

Right?

There were people Klaus slept with who he’d considered friends. Or people he knew and saw on the regular and had generally positive feelings for at least. 

There were people Klaus had slept with whose faces he couldn’t remember. Who he could barley remember talking to. Those who he only knew where there because of what they left behind. He laughed about those, a drink or joint or pill clutched tightly in his hand as if the force of his grip could keep it from shaking. 

Klaus enjoyed sex. He was a proud _slut_ and would tell anyone who asked as much. 

Sometimes, Klaus wished he could step out of his body and leave it behind.

Klaus had a great deal of affection for many of the people he’d had sex with. They tended to be a fun group. Really. On the average. 

Klaus could count on his fingers the number of times someone had told him, “I love you.” All of them had happened before he turned eighteen. 

Klaus was simply not the type to have a relationship. He didn’t want one. 

Klaus was kidnapped and tortured and transplanted to the fucking Vietnam War all in the course of about two days. 

Klaus met Dave. 

And his world shifted on its axis.

At first, he told himself he was just going to spend the day. After all, he couldn’t just disappear in front of all these people. And how often did one get to travel through time? One who wasn’t Five at least. And cute, smiling soldiers didn’t drop out of the sky. 

Technically, Klaus did. 

But that was beside the point.

For the first month, Klaus told himself every night that he was going home the next day. 

Then Dave’s hand brushed his in the mess tent and Klaus decided to fuck with it all and moved the briefcase to the bottom of his footlocker. There was no point in carrying it around, he reasoned. It would only get damaged in a literal war zone. 

Klaus often lied to himself.

When he kissed Dave for the first time, the two of them absolutely silent in the dark behind the fucking latrines of all places because that’s the last place someone would look for an illicit love affair, Klaus allowed himself to acknowledge for the first time the new unfamiliar thing that had been cracking open inside his chest for the past three months. 

As he lay awake some hours later, watching Dave’s cot through half-lidden eyes, he admitted, in the privacy of his mind, that he was in love. 

When they first made love⏤

_And how ridiculous is that phrase? Made love? Klaus had never used a term so sentimental before, though he didn’t find he minded the thought._

 _⏤_ Dave held him so gently under his huge hands that Klaus had to tell him it was okay to touch. 

Throughout it all, he asked about a hundred times if Klaus was okay. When Klaus said, laughing gently, that Dave must not have had much experience if he was so nervous, Dave gave him a tiny frown of confusion. 

He told Klaus he’d had plenty of lovers before, that it was normal to make sure someone was okay. The look on Klaus’ face made him ask again if they should stop, to which Klaus could only shake his head and press himself more firmly against Dave, while a thread of tension he didn’t know he carried evaporated. 

When it was over, Dave didn’t get up for a drink or a cigarette. He stayed and laid with Klaus and ran his fingers through the tangled curls and talked about his family and his childhood. Klaus watched him, feeling exposed and tender and for once pleased by those feelings, not afraid. 

It was strange. Klaus had slept with plenty of people who liked to cuddle and talk before he’d met Dave. It had never felt like that before. 

Sometimes, Dave and Klaus talked about what life would be like after the war. Dave laughed at Klaus' firm insistence that things were going to change for people like them. That in a few years, they would be able to walk down the street together in some place like New York or San Francisco and just _be._ That one day, they could get married. 

He told Klaus, fondly, though with obvious disbelief in his light tone, that he was crazy. He would cut off Klaus’ protests to the contrary with a kiss.

Sometimes, Klaus imagined an apartment and growing old and found he didn’t mind. 

The first time Dave murmured, _“I love you”_ into the crook of Klaus’ neck, he responded the same effortlessly, without thinking. It never even crossed his mind to be panicked by something he’d never thought he would say. 

  
  
  


Dave died. 

  
  
  


Klaus found himself back on the same bus, as if he had never left but for the blood on his hands, and a gaping ragged hole in his chest where he once had iron bars. 

The apocalypse happened and Klaus was still alive. It sucked but to be honest, it felt like the physical event had lagged a few days, or years, depending on how you look at it, behind the real end of the world. 

Klaus’ world ended in the jungle with a bullet and a pointless war. 

  
  


It took him three years to work up the courage to see Dave. 

On some level, it made sense to wait. Dave was still so young⏤ it actually made Klaus feel like a bit of a creep, pining after him. 

But knowing that he was there, alive, whole, undamaged by the fucking army or war, that he was _safe_ ⏤ it was enough to keep Klaus going when he believed he was the only one who made it out. 

He had one piece of living family left, even if Dave didn’t know who he was.

Sure, his strategy for survival was perhaps was little… less than honest, but, hey, it was the sixties. Who _wasn’t_ starting a cult? At least Klaus didn’t prevent anyone from leaving if they wanted to.

Klaus didn’t pay much attention in history, but he knew what day was approaching, the gravity of its importance made stronger by what followed the assassination. He abandoned his most successful grift, really his only successful...anything, without a backward glance. Dave needed him.

Seeing Dave again, even in the young frame that Klaus did not yet know, brought every memory flooding back in sharp focus. The war came in flashes that seemed hyper-realistic, the smell of blood and mud seeping into his bones as he clutched the wheel of the car in an iron grip. 

The memories of Dave, beautiful and glowing in the low light while he whispered _“I love you”_ and him laying _bloody, broken, dying,_ overlapped with each other until Klaus could barely breathe under them. 

He gritted his teeth and let worry about Allison overtake him for a few hours. 

Klaus knew, on some level, that it was unlikely that Dave would fall in love with him again. That in his current timeline, Dave would only know him as the crazy guy who bought pink paint for his second bathroom and then stalked him to a diner. But knowing that he was alive and that Klaus couldn’t have him was a hell of a lot better than knowing he was dead on a field for no good reason, the last three years had proven that beyond a doubt.

So Klaus had marched up to the booth with desperation, yes, but also a steady certainty that Dave, his wonderful, sweet, kind Dave, who didn’t have a cruel bone in his body, would see reason if just one person told him he didn’t have to be the kind of man he thought he was supposed to be. 

_There had been rumors at the camp, of course. The way they looked at each other had been too intense for there not to be._

  
  


Klaus had been hit plenty of times in his life. Being a child vigilante tended to do that to a person. So did being a homeless drug addict. And being a general asshole. 

_They’d been caught sneaking back into the tent once. But a few quickly improvised lies about meeting girls in the village had covered their asses that time⏤ or at least staved off suspicion enough that they didn’t get jumped._

Fuck, Klaus had even been hit by a few of the people he’d fucked in the past. It happened. 

_When someone had hissed that word at them as they walked back through camp, Dave had been the one to put a hand on Klaus’ arm to stop him from doing something stupid. “It doesn’t matter,” he’d told Klaus later that night after Klaus had ranted and raved about ‘fucking assholes’ for nearly thirty minutes. “We love each other, and that isn’t diminished by a word.”_

_Klaus had wrapped him up so tightly after that statement they were both left a little breathless._

Klaus had been shot, stabbed, electrocuted, zapped by magic violin energy beams, beaten, tortured, and brought back to life. 

Nothing he’d ever experienced had been as painful as Dave’s fist against his jaw. 

Klaus drank until the memories stayed where they were supposed to, jammed tightly away in little boxes, and shoved under the bed like dirty laundry. Thoughts of finger-shaped bruises and ugly words and weak arguments were stifled again, back where they belonged in the land of Things We Don’t Think About. 

As Klaus drifted off into blessed unconsciousness on Allison’s couch, one last thought slipped out despite all his best efforts. 

_It hurts more when it’s someone you love._

**Author's Note:**

> heeey
> 
> lmk if it's bad
> 
> or if it's good
> 
> idk man. 
> 
> i'm sad af.


End file.
